A win for Hong Kong’s youth

The breaking news Sunday evening was the sacking of Vice President Leni Robredo as co-chairperson of the Inter-Agency Committee on Anti-Illegal Drugs. It was not unexpected actually, given how the president days earlier hurled insults at Robredo. It was a fitting end, in fact, to a president’s infantile obsession with getting back at whoever dares to question his flagship policies.

The whole two-week episode can be summed up this way: The bluff was that no one could wage war against drugs better than this administration. Anyone thinks she can do a better job? She can have it.

The vice president called the bluff, and not only did she take the job, she took it in all serious manner. And when she began to make headway, the testosterone-driven old boys club permeating the halls of Malacañang all squirmed in their seats. They then scrambled to lay the premise for kicking out the woman whom they thought was a weakling.

“Not shocking, not surprising, not unexpected. Boring, actually,” said Senator Panfilo Lacson in his Twitter account. “The more exciting question is, between PRRD and VP Robredo, guess who’s laughing now?” he added.

The bigger news for me, however, came Monday morning from Hong Kong. The city’s silent majority have spoken. Hong Kong’s administrators thought all along that the silent majority are supportive of the government, asserting that the protesters have no popular backing.

Well on Sunday, in what was supposed to be an inconsequential election for council seats that mainly impact community issues like street lighting and garbage collection, the voters of Hong Kong lined up to vote in record numbers, in what the New York Times described as “a vivid expression of the city’s aspirations and its anger with the Chinese government.”

Pro-democracy candidates took at least 389 of the 452 elected seats, up from only 124 and far surpassing the previous high of 198 set in 2003, reported the New York Times. The young people of Hong Kong played a major role in the election, not only as voters but also in mobilizing warm bodies in the streets during protests that have been going on and off for several months already.

Because most of the protesters are young, this may have prompted Hong Kong’s leaders to assert that the greater majority who are silent are still sympathetic to the status quo. Sunday’s election proved them wrong. Prominent pro-Beijing politicians who lost their respective races were gracious in defeat, saying that the government should listen to the people’s demands.

After the city’s handover from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, the Basic Law of Hong Kong was supposed to ensure the region’s high degree of autonomy from the mainland until 2047. But the people of Hong Kong already felt this early Beijing’s increasing interference in the freedoms they inherited from British rule.

It’s not yet clear how China will react to the recent developments in Hong Kong, and in how this will impact on its diversionary aggressive foreign policy in the region. Who would ever think that the young people of Hong Kong could humble an emerging economic and military giant?

This movement led by young people interests me also because I could feel the beginning of a surge of young people’s active involvement in a much bigger issue – climate change and the refusal of world governments to effectively address a looming environmental catastrophe. I tell you, this is something to watch in the years ahead.